New manufacturing equipment could be used at sea or in deep space

New manufacturing equipment could be used at sea or in deep space
by Jeremy Agor for UTA News
Arlington TX (SPX) Jul 28, 2023

An industrial engineering researcher at The University of Texas at Arlington has earned a grant from the Department of Defense to purchase state-of-the-art hybrid additive-subtractive manufacturing equipment.

The project will improve manufacturing capabilities at UTA for printing a wide range of metals and alloys. The grant recipient, Emma Yang, is an assistant professor in the Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Department and an expert in additive and sustainable manufacturing.

"This equipment will help us determine how the Navy could use hybrid manufacturing to effectively and efficiently repair and remanufacture parts," Yang said. "With this machine, if you have a defective part or one that is worn from use, you can just fix the part instead of having to replace it. The Navy could use this on a ship at sea, and if you combine zero-gravity printing, you could eventually print parts where resources and tools are very limited, like on Mars."

he hybrid machine has a multi-modal in-situ monitoring system that includes a high-speed camera, infrared temperature sensor, melt pool monitor and ultrasound inspection. It will allow Yang and her team to identify fabrication anomalies during the printing process so they can be corrected immediately, rather than finding the problem after the print is complete.

The new equipment is critical to the education of the next generation of scientists and engineers, and Yang plans to develop a bilingual English/Spanish virtual training platform for hybrid manufacturing that integrates knowledge and research findings generated from the machine.

The funding for this project comes from Historically Black Colleges and Universities/Minority-Serving Institution (HBCU/MI) grants provided by the Department of Defense to fund programs that will improve the capabilities of those institutions to conduct research and educate scientists and engineers in areas important to national defense.

UTA earned the Hispanic-Serving Institution designation in 2014. Among the 570-plus universities designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions by the U.S. Department of Education, UTA is No. 3 for awarding bachelor's degrees to African American students, No. 12 for Asian American students, No. 15 for Hispanic students, No. 10 for Native American students, and No. 8 for total minority students, according to the magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.